Pulitzer Board Finds No Problems With Now-Debunked Award-Winning Fake News Russiagate Stories

In a statement that proves how meaningless a Pulitzer Prize is in this age of blatant media manipulation, Party-supported disinformation, and fake news, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that they have essentially investigated themselves and (shockingly) found no problems with their decisions.

But you’ll just have to take their word for it, because they aren’t going to release the report of their findings. They promise they reviewed the complaints lodged against them for awarding Pulitzer Prizes to journalists who wrote fake stories, and they’ve found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Specifically, issues were raised regarding “submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.” Even Axios, a decidedly leftist outlet, has discussed what they call “The media’s epic fail” regarding Russiagate coverage.

According to the Pulitzer Board statement,

“These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes. The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”

The staff at these outlets received this prize “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

The reason this is such a big issue is that the entire Russiagate story has since been proven to be a manufactured hoax instigated as a partisan attack against a political opponent and based entirely on now-debunked fictional information. The Steele dossier, the foundation for the entire Russian hoax, has been proven to be fabricated, and numerous sources of supporting information have been caught providing false information on the subject. Even top investigative officials have denounced information in these stories as false or misleading.

If these stories were “deeply sourced,” does it matter that the sources, most of whom were anonymous, gave blatantly false or misleading information? And while it’s true that they were “relentlessly reported,” does it matter that it was a fake story that they were relentlessly reporting? Apparently not. But Pulitzer is right about one thing–these stories did “dramatically further the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration” by convincing an entire nation of a completely false and politically-motivated story intended to undermine a duly elected president and his administration, which was largely disliked by the mainstream media organizations perpetuating the fake stories.

Aaron Maté of RealClearInvestigations compiled some examples of fake news winning a Pulitzer Prize. The first story listed as “Winning Work” by the Pulitzer organization is an article by The Washington Post titled “Officials say Flynn discussed sanctions.” According to Maté,

“Less than a month after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, the Washington Post significantly advanced the then-growing narrative that the Trump White House was beholden to Russia.

A Feb. 9, 2017, Post article claimed that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia” with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The Post sourced its reporting to nine “current and former officials” who occupied “senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls” between Flynn and Kislyak following the Nov. 8, 2016 election. . .

The Post and its sources fueled innuendo that Flynn had floated a payback for Russia’s alleged 2016 election help and lied to cover it up.

When the transcripts of his calls with Kislyak were finally released in May 2020, they showed that Flynn had grounds to fight: It wasn’t Flynn who made a false statement about discussing sanctions with Kislyak; it was all nine of the Post’s sources — and, later, the Mueller team — who had misled the public.

In all of Flynn’s multiple conversations with Kislyak in December 2016 and January 2017, the issue of sanctions only gets one fleeting mention – by Kislyak. The Russian ambassador tells Flynn that he is concerned that sanctions will hurt U.S.-Russia cooperation on fighting jihadist insurgents in Syria. The sum total of Flynn’s response on the matter: ‘Yeah, yeah.'”

As for The New York Times, they published a fake story on Feb. 14th, 2017, titled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence,” which reported,

“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”

They falsely suggested that these “repeated contacts” by Trump aides were what sparked the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russian collusion, saying,

“American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”

But just 4 months later, FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress about this story, saying that, “in the main, it was not true.” The Mueller report that was released in April 2019 did not contain any evidence of contact between Trump campaign associates and any Russian intelligence officials. Even Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who initially opened the Russian Collusion Hoax investigation, stated in now-declassified documents that the NYT article was “misleading and inaccurate. . . we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Hilariously, The Washington Post reported on FBI Director Comey denouncing the fake story by The New York Times. You know, the fake story that still won a Pulitzer Prize with The Washington Post. . .

Maté details several other glaring falsehoods which were present in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russiagate reporting. And not only have these mainstream news outlets failed to adequately correct or acknowledge their provably false reporting, but the Pulitzer Board apparently found nothing wrong with any of these inconsistencies or falsehoods. What does that say about modern journalism and Pulitzer Prizes? It says that “journalists” whose content is consistent with The Party narrative are apparently allowed to not only publish false stories and blatantly mislead the public while facing no consequences for their immoral and unethical journalistic practices, but that they also will probably win prizes for that fake news and subsequently enjoy more prominent careers in the world of journalism.

It means that truth and accuracy are no longer a priority in modern mainstream journalism, and that the American public can no longer trust any content generated by these outlets. How can we?